Former student overhauls a high school TV studio

On a December afternoon inside Qualcomm Stadium in 2000, a handful of television production students from Fallbrook High School pulled a panel van alongside the football field and started running cable down the sidelines.

Ryan Promack was one of them, a junior at the time, enamored with the way the professionals put on a show. The Warriors were set to play in the CIF finals that day, and Promack would be there to make sure the victory was captured from three angles, in the fashion of any proper sports channel.

“It wasn’t just a three-camera shoot of a football game — there’s plenty of high schools that can pull that off at a home game,” he said. “But the idea of going to Qualcomm Stadium and making this happen, I don’t know of any other high school that’s done that. We were the only high school that actually had anybody down there with a video camera.”

Promack had spent his Friday and Saturday that week tearing down the school’s TV studio at the Stage Coach Lane campus and reassembling it inside the van. His teacher at the time, Fritz Schattschneider, “laughed and said, ‘Just be sure I can do the news again on Monday,’” he recalled.

That moment was the most ambitious during four years of dabbling that became a career in television for Promack.

Today, he spends most of his time working in Los Angeles as a freelance video editor and studio engineer. He has edited CNN segments for eight years and worked for a company that upgraded studios like “Inside Edition.”

But he can’t shake his Fallbrook roots.

We met inside the studio at Fallbrook High on a recent school day, surrounded by equipment that Promack has carefully selected and wired together to bring the Warrior TV set into the 21st century.

He recalls the summer — it was 2004 or ’05 —when he started overhauling the cluttered studio, which was still running on the well-worn backs of analog Sony cameras circa 1979.

“I came in two days after school got out and literally took everything out,” he told me. “Took it down to the walls, vacuumed, touched up the paint, and started the process of bringing everything back in and laying it out in a way that made better use of the space.

“By that point, I had been working a couple of years for a company out of Pasadena, installing TV studios,” he added. “I’d go to work, we’d do something, and I’d go, ‘OK, now I know how to do that.’”

In turn, that knowledge — worth a lot of money in Hollywood — made its way back down to Stage Coach Lane.

A couple of years into the process, Promack persuaded Schattschneider, his old teacher, to convert the TV production class into an ROP program to bring in some county education funding.

“That ended up meaning $5,000 or $6,000 extra a year,” he recalled. “So I said, ‘OK, Fritz, every year, give me that money and I’ll go out and buy the equipment you need.’”

Promack would scour eBay for days, looking for good deals on used switchers and cameras. The studio is now running a pair of digital cameras “off a TV truck somewhere back east,” purchased last summer, he said.

He remembers the days when the daily news used to stream live from the studio, via closed-circuit television, to the classrooms on campus.

Now, under current instructor Mark Schneider, the students have a couple of periods to edit the news that broadcasts from the desk that is the focal point of the revamped studio.

“I’ve never really known of any other high school that really even attempted a full studio production like this,” he went on. “Even when I was here, I think we were still one of the only high schools that did a live newscast every morning out of a studio.”

To the students, it means much higher chances of finding jobs in the industry: “(The equipment) is new enough that the kids can learn here and go to Palomar or intern at any of the stations in San Diego, and they’ll be familiar enough with what modern technology looks like and how it functions.”

Even with a wife and an infant son, Promack finds the time to check in on campus a few times a year. He and Schneider will troubleshoot problems in the studio and begin searching for equipment upgrades all over again.

This is what has become of a self-imposed project almost a decade ago. Few alumni dedicate themselves to a school the way Promack has.

“I was still young and not married and had a lot of free time, so I came to Fritz one day and said, ‘You know, we’re going to do something about this,’” he recalled. “He kind of rolled his eyes and said, ‘OK. If you want to do all the work.’”